This Series E round will bring the total funding to $564 million for the San Francisco social scrapbooking startup since it launched in 2010.

Yes, you may say it out loud: Yipes!

In a statement, co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann said: “We hope to be a service that everyone uses to inspire their future, whether that’s dinner tomorrow night, a vacation next summer, or a dream house someday. This new investment enables us to pursue that goal even more aggressively.”

I’d say so — now Pinterest can afford the really big guns.

But to perhaps help assuage the worry — more like: “Good god, VCs have lost their marbles again!!!” — that Silicon Valley is in a bubble with this latest massive investment, especially given Pinterest’s lack of revenue, the company also released some new stats about its usage growth and what it plans to use the money for.

Such as:

Pinterest will use the additional capital for corporate purposes including:

International expansion that builds on 125% international growth since the beginning of the year. Pinterest recently launched in UK, France and Italy and plans to launch in 10 more countries before the end of the year.

Investment in the core Pinterest service, especially mobile which has grown 50% since the beginning of the year to become more than three-fourths of all usage (for comparison, LinkedIn just announced 38%).

Continued development of monetization, which first began testing earlier this month, into a global program.

Capital investments in technical infrastructure to make the service faster, more reliable and more efficient.

Strategic acquisitions of both talent and technology.

Well, alrighty then!

In fact, some of this is already happening. Pinterest recently said it hired country managers — its first global employees — in France (where it launched its first localized edition in June) and England. Pinterest had also indicated interest in Japan, when it raised $100 million from Rakuten in May of 2012. It also expanded to Italy, as it noted.

Pinterest also just did a deal, unpaid, to be preinstalled on Google Android phones distributed by Telefónica’s various carrier brands in Latin America and Europe.

Pinterest has seen huge growth as consumers have flocked to the free site on which they “pin” photos of their interests and share them widely. Usage has exploded since it was founded several years ago and has also become an increasingly key driver of traffic across the Web to other sites.

While comScore showed Pinterest had 24.9 million unique monthly users in September, that is only in the United States and is desktop only. As AllThingsD previously reported, in March alone, after mobile and international is added, it had close to 50 million unique monthly users worldwide.

Growth is the ticket to Pinterest’s funding, since it hasn’t had the opportunity to have slowing revenue or disappoint investors with monetization troubles yet, because it has yet to even try to make any money. In fact, the company started its first test of advertising, called “promoted pins” that appear in search results and category feeds, just a few weeks ago.

But that’s an unpaid trial, according to the extensive disclosure post personally penned by Silbermann that tried to ease users into the idea of advertisers having any place at all on the site.

Still, as with Facebook’s Instagram, marketers are interested in finding new ways of reaching consumers in innovative ways, especially over mobile devices.

Pinterest, essentially, is building the ultimate personalized catalog of the digital age.

Sources said most of its current investors — including Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Valiant Capital Management — reupped in the latest round. But Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, which had already sunk $100 million into the San Francisco-based social scrapbooking site in May of 2012, was not part of this round.

Sources said the money was aimed in part at goosing international efforts, which has seen strong growth.

(Update: Pinterest is now confirming the funding, investors and valuation, with a statement from co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann: “We hope to be a service that everyone uses to inspire their future, whether that’s dinner tomorrow night, a vacation next summer, or a dream house someday. This new investment enables us to pursue that goal even more aggressively.”)

The company recently said it hired country managers — its first global employees — in France (where it launched its first localized edition in June) and England. Pinterest had also indicated interest in Japan, when it raised money from Rakuten. It also expanded to Italy.

Ambitiously, sources said Pinterest has plans to expand to up to a dozen additional countries by the end of the year.

Also on the international front, Pinterest just scored a deal (again, unpaid) to be preinstalled on Google Android phones distributed by Telefónica’s various carrier brands in Latin America and Europe.

Pinterest has seen huge growth as consumers have flocked to the free site on which they “pin” photos of their interests and share them widely. Usage has exploded since it was founded several years ago and has also become an increasingly key driver of traffic across the Web to other sites.

While comScore showed Pinterest had 24.9 million unique monthly users in September, that is only in the United States and is desktop only. As AllThingsD previously reported, in March alone, after mobile and international is added, it had close to 50 million unique monthly users worldwide.

Growth is the ticket to Pinterest’s funding, since it hasn’t had the opportunity to have slowing revenue growth or disappoint investors with monetization troubles yet, because it has yet to even try to make any money. In fact, the company started its first test of advertising, called “promoted pins” that appear in search results and category feeds, just a few weeks ago.

But that’s an unpaid trial, according to the extensive disclosure post personally penned by Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann that tried to ease users into the idea of advertisers having any place at all on the site.

Still, as with Facebook’s Instagram, advertisers are interested in finding new ways of reaching consumers in innovative ways. Pinterest, essentially, is building the ultimate personalized catalog of the digital age.

Continuing to grow mobile usage is also key for Pinterest, as it is with many other Internet companies. Sources said that, too, has grown to represent a huge part of its user base.

Pinterest had 150 employees as of September.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131023/pinterest-does-another-massive-funding-225-million-at-3-8-billion-valuation/feed/0Telefónica Will Push Pinterest to New Users in Latin America and Europehttp://allthingsd.com/20131010/telefonica-will-push-pinterest-to-new-users-in-latin-america-and-europe/
http://allthingsd.com/20131010/telefonica-will-push-pinterest-to-new-users-in-latin-america-and-europe/#commentsThu, 10 Oct 2013 13:59:56 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=364552Android phones sold by Telefónica and its brands Vivo, O2 and Movistar, will soon include a Pinterest widget by default, the companies said today.

The widget is meant to appeal to new users who don’t have accounts on the service in Telefónica’s markets in Latin America and Europe. It auto-updates on the home screen, and gives non-registered users the ability to browse popular pins.

By contrast, the regular Pinterest Android app requires users to open it and sign in. (Not that people don’t like the app; it has 4.7 out of five stars on Google Play.)

For Pinterest, the deal is all about pushing growth; the company said it has had more than 130 percent growth in monthly active users from Latin America and the U.K. this year.

The deal won’t generate any revenue for Pinterest, a spokeswoman said.

We are entering the golden age of mobile. Mobile has become the most critical tool to enhance productivity and drive human ingenuity and technological growth. And the global mobile market will reach $1.65 trillion in revenue this year. Over the next decade, that revenue number will more than double. If we segment the sources of this revenue, there will be a drastic shift over the course of the next 10 years. During the last decade, voice accounted for over 55 percent of the total revenue, data access 17 percent, and the over-the-top and digital services a mere three percent. Over the next decade, we expect mobile digital services to be the leading revenue-generating category for the industry, with approximately 30 percent of the total revenue. Voice will represent less than 21 percent.

There is already a significant shift in revenue structures for many players. The traditional revenue curves of voice and messaging are declining in most markets. Mobile data access, while still in its infancy in many markets, is starting to face significant margin pressure. As such, the industry has to invest in building a healthy ecosystem on the back of the fourth wave — the OTT and digital services. The revenue generated on the fourth wave is going to be massive, but much more distributed than the previous curves. It will end up being a multi-trillion-dollar market in a matter of a decade — growing much faster and scaling to much greater heights than previous revenue curves.

Vodafone, one of the biggest mobile operators in the world, recently reported that in each of its 21 markets, voice and messaging declined (YOY). In some markets, like Italy, even the data access segment suffered negative growth. However, what was more disturbing was that the increase in access revenue didn’t negate the decline in voice and messaging revenue in any market. The net revenue declined in every single market, no matter which geography it belonged to. The net effect was that the overall revenue declined by nine percent, despite data access revenue growing by eight percent, because the overall voice and messaging revenue streams suffered double-digit losses. Once the access revenue started to decline (and it is already happening to some of the operators), these companies will have to take some drastic measures to attain growth. The investment and a clear strategy on the fourth wave will become even more urgent. They will have to find a way to become Digital Lifestyle Solution Providers.

So, what is the mobile fourth wave, and who are the dominant players today? The fourth wave is not a single entity or a functional block like voice, messaging or data access, but is made up of dozens of new application areas, some of which have not even been dreamt up yet. As such, this portfolio of services requires a different skill set for both development and monetization. Another key difference in the competitive landscape is that the biggest competitors for these services (depending on the region) might not be another operator but the Internet players who are well funded, nimble and very ambitious. The services range from horizontal offerings such as mobile cloud; commerce and payments; security; analytics; and risk management to mobile being tightly integrated with the vertical industries such as retail, health, education, auto, home, energy and media. Mobile will change every vertical from the ground up, and that’s what will define the mobile fourth wave.

In the past, the Top 10 players by revenue were always mobile operators. If we take a look at the Top 10 players by revenue on the fourth wave, there are only five operators on the list. The Internet players like Apple, Google, Amazon, Starbucks and eBay are generating more revenue on this curve than some of the incumbent players. However, some of the operators like AT&T, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica and Verizon have been investing steadily on the fourth curve for some time. The two Japanese operators on the list have even started to report the digital revenue in their financials.

Just as data represents 50 percent or more of their overall revenue, we expect that, for some of these operators, digital will represent more than 50 percent of their data revenue within five years. Relatively smaller operators like Sprint, Turkcell, SingTel and Telstra are also investing in new service areas that will change how operators see their opportunities, competition and revenue streams.

This shift to digital has larger implications, as well. Countries with archaic labor laws that don’t afford companies the flexibility needed to be digital players are going to be at a disadvantage. It is one thing to have figured out the strategy and the areas to invest in, and it is completely another to execute with the focus and tenacity of an upstart. If companies are not able to assemble the right talents to pursue the virgin markets, someone else will. Such players will see decline in their revenues and become targets for M&A. Some of this is already evident in the European markets, which are also plagued by economic woes. Regulators will have a tough task ahead of them in evaluating some unconventional M&As in the coming years.

The shift to digital will also have an impact on the rest of the ecosystem. The infrastructure providers will have to develop expertise in services that can be sold in partnership with the operators. Device OEMs without a credible digital-services portfolio will find it hard to compete just on product or on price. The Internet players will have to form alliances to find distribution and scale. The emergence of the fourth wave is good news for startups. Instead of just looking toward Google or Apple, the exit route now includes the operator landscape, as well. In fact, some of the operators have been making strategic acquisitions in specific segments over the last few years — Telefonica acquired AxisMed, Brazil’s largest chronic-care management company; Verizon acquired Hughes Telematics; and SingTel acquired Amobee.

For any telecom operator looking to enter the digital realm, the strategic options and road map are fairly clear. First, it has to solidify and protect its core business and assets. A great broadband network is the table stakes to be considered a player in the digital ecosystem. Depending on the financial condition of the operator, the non-core assets should be slowly spun off or sold to potential buyers so that the company can squarely focus on preserving the core and on launching the digital business with full force. The digital business requires a portfolio management approach that requires a completely different mindset and skillset to navigate the competitive landscape.

The first three revenue growth curves have served the industry well, but now it is time for the industry to refocus its energies on the fourth curve that will completely redefine the mobile industry, its players and the revenue opportunities. Several new players will start to emerge that will create new revenue from applications and services that transform every industry vertical that contributes significantly to the global GDP. As players like Apple and Google continue to lead, mobile operators will have to regroup, collaborate and refocus to become digital players.

There will be hardly any vertical that is not transformed by the confluence of mobile broadband, cloud services and applications. In fact, the very notion of computing has changed drastically. The use of tablets and smartphones instead of PCs has altered the computing ecosystem. Players and enterprises who aren’t gearing up for this enormous opportunity will get assimilated.

The future of mobile is not just about the platform, but about what’s built on the platform. It is very clear that the winners will be defined by how they react to the fourth wave that will shape mobile industry’s next trillion dollars.

Chetan Sharma is founder and president of Chetan Sharma Consulting, and is one of the leading strategists in the mobile industry. He has served as an adviser to senior executive management of several Fortune 100 companies in the wireless space, including each of the Top 6 global mobile data operators.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130826/mobile-fourth-wave-the-evolution-of-the-next-trillion-dollars/feed/0New Plans From AT&T, T-Mobile Put U.S. More in Line With Rest of Worldhttp://allthingsd.com/20130716/new-plans-from-att-t-mobile-put-u-s-more-in-line-with-rest-of-world/
http://allthingsd.com/20130716/new-plans-from-att-t-mobile-put-u-s-more-in-line-with-rest-of-world/#commentsTue, 16 Jul 2013 16:33:19 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=342393Though Americans are used to getting a steep discount on a new cellphone in exchange for signing a new contract, that’s less common in most parts of the world.

Elsewhere, it is more typical to buy a cellphone at full price and then use it with one’s phone provider of choice. In exchange for bringing one’s own device, subscribers in many places pay far less each month for their cellphone service.

While some prepaid carriers have replicated this model in the U.S., subsidized phones have long been the norm here. However, that may be about to change.

And it is T-Mobile — the smallest of the four major U.S. carriers — that has been at the forefront of that shift.

For a time, T-Mobile offered both traditional American plans and lower-cost “value” plans for those who paid full price for a device or brought their own phones. Since March, T-Mobile has made the value plans standard and unbundled the phone from the service plan.

Doing so, said T-Mobile chief John Legere, is what paved the way for further innovations, such as the recently introduced Jump program that allows customers to upgrade their phones as often as twice a year.

AT&T on Tuesday introduced its Next plans, which allow customers to upgrade more frequently and also see customers paying full price for their devices. While AT&T’s program does pave the way for more frequent updates, the company isn’t making any move to cut its monthly fees.

The key question on many customers’ minds is whether all of this experimentation will lead to bills going up or down.

Those wondering what a cut in subsidies can do to a cellphone market should have a look at Spain, where subsidies were the norm until Telefonica underwent a bold experiment in 2012. The move resulted in lower revenue for the carrier, but also boosted overall profit margins.

Most likely this change — like others in the market — will lead to both higher and lower prices.

As support for that theory, one need only look at the current prepaid market, which offers both some of the best bargains around as well as pay-as-you-go options that end up costing far more than a typical contract plan.

But the latest shifts aren’t just about cost. A key element is flexibility, particularly the ability to upgrade more frequently that the two-year cycle made rigid through contract plans.

Take Nokia, for example. By the time Verizon was ready to launch the Lumia 928, Nokia was off in London launching an even newer model, the Lumia 925, that was headed to T-Mobile but not Verizon. And last week, just as T-Mobile was in New York, in part to announce availability for the 925, Nokia was in Manhattan to talk about its next project, the Lumia 1020 for AT&T.

Carriers are trying to tap that desire for more frequent upgrades as justification for a needed shift in their economics. It’s an approach that the operators have used with success in the recent past.

The arrival of shared data plans, such as Verizon’s Share Everything plan, filled a key customer demand. However, both Verizon and AT&T used the shift to fill one of their own needs, as well. Before the arrival of such plans, the bulk of a customer’s bill was for voice and text messaging, even though it was data that had become the key component. Plus, carriers could see both voice and text were rapidly commoditizing thanks to over-the-top services such as Skype and WhatsApp.

With their shared plans, AT&T and Verizon included unlimited voice and texting, and shifted the equation to focus on data as the variable worth paying for.

So what does all that mean? As usual with cellphone options, it pays to read the fine print and do the math.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130716/new-plans-from-att-t-mobile-put-u-s-more-in-line-with-rest-of-world/feed/0HTML5 App Platform Ludei Nabs $1.5 Million in VC, Angel Fundinghttp://allthingsd.com/20130626/html5-app-platform-ludei-nabs-1-5-million-in-vc-angel-funding/
http://allthingsd.com/20130626/html5-app-platform-ludei-nabs-1-5-million-in-vc-angel-funding/#commentsWed, 26 Jun 2013 10:00:18 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=336598HTML5 app platform Ludei has received $1.5 million in funding from a group of unnamed angel investors and two Spanish venture capital firms, Kibo Ventures and Vitamina K. The San Francisco-based company’s mission is cross-platform apps that can be developed once and easily deployed to multiple mobile, social, desktop and browser app ecosystems. Ludei CEO Eneko Knorr sold his first venture, the Spanish Web-hosting company Hostalia, to Telefonica in 2007. This is Ludei’s first funding, excluding the $3 million Knorr personally put up to found the company.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130626/html5-app-platform-ludei-nabs-1-5-million-in-vc-angel-funding/feed/0The Global Carrier Perspective: Telefonica and MTS on Balancing Developed and Developing Markets (Video)http://allthingsd.com/20130523/the-global-carrier-perspective-telefonica-and-mts-on-balancing-developed-and-developing-markets-video/
http://allthingsd.com/20130523/the-global-carrier-perspective-telefonica-and-mts-on-balancing-developed-and-developing-markets-video/#commentsThu, 23 May 2013 22:50:23 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=324898Telefonica’s revenue comes half from Europe and half from Latin America. But it has 100 million customers in Europe and 200 million in Latin America, where there is just 13 percent smartphone penetration.

Carlos Domingo and Michael Hecker

“It’s kind of like two different businesses,” said Carlos Domingo, director of product development and innovation for Telefonica Digital, speaking at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in April. Whereas in Europe, Telefonica is looking toward opportunities in business-to-business and cloud computing, in Latin America most of its customers don’t have bank accounts.

Domingo is a forward-thinking kind of guy, leading his company’s work on things like Firefox OS and partnerships with and acquisitions of companies like Everything.me and Tokbox. But he also knows his team is playing catch-up. Of WhatsApp, the immensely popular global text messaging app, Domingo said, “They’ve done something we should have done — we’ve been sitting on SMS without changing it very much.”

“We don’t have a problem being a dumb pipe as long as the dumb pipe delivers us the investment funds for going into other businesses,” he said, mentioning cloud computing and financial services.

To that end, MTS is opening bank outlets in Russia, given its billing relationship with customers is often their only banking and credit relationship. The carrier uses its mobile customers’ payment history as an in-house credit score.

Both Domingo and Hecker expressed strong interest in breaking away from Apple and Google’s control of the mobile market, noting their support for Mozilla and Microsoft, respectively.

The San Francisco-based company has built a demo app called MindMeld that shows some of what its “anticipatory computing” can do, but what it really wants is for partners — like, say, Intel, Samsung and Telefónica — to include support for its work in their own products and services.

The funding doesn’t come with a guarantee that will happen, but it’s a pretty good start. Along with previous investor Google Ventures, said CEO Tim Tuttle, Expect Labs now has buy-in from “one of the largest players in each vertical: devices, software, hardware and carriers.”

Next up for Expect Labs is hiring and improving its understanding of a wider range of what people can say. That includes new languages and subject matters, like cooking and recipes, according to Tuttle.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130430/expect-labs-gets-endorsements-and-money-from-samsung-intel-and-telefonica/feed/0A Look at Mobile Markets in Russia and Latin Americahttp://allthingsd.com/20130416/a-look-at-mobile-markets-in-russia-and-latin-america/
http://allthingsd.com/20130416/a-look-at-mobile-markets-in-russia-and-latin-america/#commentsTue, 16 Apr 2013 22:22:35 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=312987Imagine a wireless market that has the characteristics of both the developed world and the developing world. That’s exactly what Russia is, and it’s what Michael Hecker, vice president of strategy, M&A and corporate development for Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), Russia’s largest wireless carrier, deals with every day.

MTS sells iPhones to rich people in the Russian capital of Moscow, but sells lower-end phones that bring in lower revenues in other markets throughout the country. That brings certain opportunities. For one thing, MTS has bought its way into banking. Russia, Hecker said, is “underbanked and [has] a low number of consumers with credit cards.” But MTS, he said, “has enough ingredients to make banking successful.”

Hecker appeared with Carlos Domingo, who has been spearheading numerous efforts for Spain-based Telefonica, and both gave a glimpse of the market conditions in their parts of the world in a joint interview with Ina Fried at D: Dive Into Mobile in New York.

Telefonica is also active in several markets in Latin America, where the mix of available devices varies quite a bit from the typical iPhone-Android mix seen in the U.S. BlackBerry devices are still popular, though they are quickly giving way to low-end Android devices. And Nokia still sells a fair number of devices running its Symbian 30 operating system in Latin America.

Regarding the forthcoming open source mobile operating system from Mozilla, Domingo said consumers still carrying an older feature phone may find it attractive when they’re ready to upgrade to their first smartphone. “We think consumers will buy the device if it brings value to them,” he said.

In that same spirit, Hecker said MTS puts a lot of effort into promoting Windows Phone, if only to prevent the onset of a true duopoly between Google and Apple. “Windows Phone is still a tough sell,” he said. “We believe we need to push it; no one else out there is going to. … If we don’t support it, we’ll have a duopoly until the end of days.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130416/a-look-at-mobile-markets-in-russia-and-latin-america/feed/0Dive Into Mobile Gets Even More Global and Adds Ad Execs From Google and Millennial Mediahttp://allthingsd.com/20130328/dive-into-mobile-gets-even-more-global-and-adds-some-ad-folks/
http://allthingsd.com/20130328/dive-into-mobile-gets-even-more-global-and-adds-some-ad-folks/#commentsThu, 28 Mar 2013 13:00:30 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=307308Our rescheduled D: Dive Into Mobile conference is just a couple of weeks away, but we’re still adding a few more speakers to the mix.

Carlos Domingo

While it was heartbreaking to have to postpone the conference due to Hurricane Sandy, we’ve been using the extra time to add a number of additional speakers and demos to cover even more ground for the rescheduled event, set for April 15 and 16 in New York.

Continuing our pledge to make this the global edition of the conference, we’re adding executives from two international carriers: Carlos Domingo of Telefonica and Michael Hecker of Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the largest carrier in Russia.

Michael Hecker

Domingo has been spearheading a number of initiatives for the Spain-based carrier, most recently leading its efforts around Firefox OS. Hecker, as vice president of strategy, M&A and corporate development, has overseen an aggressive acquisition spree that has helped MTS grow beyond just providing mobile access and become one of the leading telecommunications companies in the region.

Hecker and Domingo join executives from Brazil, China and Israel, among other locales, as well as top executives from Microsoft, Intel, Google, Facebook and Twitter — all part of a jam-packed lineup for the conference.

Mollie Spilman

Of course, what good is all this mobile stuff if you can’t make some money? So we’re also adding two prominent figures in mobile advertising: Google’s Jason Spero and Milllennial Media’s Mollie Spilman.

Jason Spero

Spero came to the search giant via AdMob and is now Google’s head of global mobile solutions (which means mobile ads). Spilman is Millennial’s EVP of North America, where she is responsible for leading the sales and operations, marketing and business development efforts; previously, she was CMO of Yahoo.

We’ll also have a new lineup of demos, as well as a revamped array of Global Voices — tales from around the world about people whose lives are being transformed through mobile technology.

Of course, we will have lots of coverage on AllThingsD, but if you want to be there in person you should hurry. The conference was sold out for October, and is likely to sell out again soon as just a handful of seats remain.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130328/dive-into-mobile-gets-even-more-global-and-adds-some-ad-folks/feed/0Why Carriers Just Love Firefox OShttp://allthingsd.com/20130224/why-carriers-just-love-firefox-os/
http://allthingsd.com/20130224/why-carriers-just-love-firefox-os/#commentsSun, 24 Feb 2013 23:30:16 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=297760There’s a good reason why Mozilla was able to get more than a dozen carriers to line up behind its browser-based phone operating system.

First off, carriers love anything that threatens to lessen the power of Apple and Android. It’s why they always express hope and optimism for any new release of Windows or BlackBerry and have for years.

“Duopolies are not beneficial for any industry,” Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta said onstage at Mozilla’s press conference on Sunday. Telefonica is betting very big on Firefox OS, bringing it to several countries this year and to all its markets by the end of next year.

Even with BlackBerry and Windows Phone, Telecom Italia CEO Franco Bernabè says there is enough opportunity for Firefox and even Tizen, a mobile version of Linux.

“I think there is room for all of them,” Bernabè said in a brief interview at the Mozilla event. “The only thing we don’t want is to have two monopolies dominating the market.”

But Firefox offers two additional benefits beyond just offering carriers a chance to knock Google and Apple down a peg.

The first of these is cost. The operating system, like Android, is free. But even more than that, it is designed to run well on low-end hardware where Android performs poorly or can’t run at all.

Secondly, Firefox is open. Carriers can do whatever they want, from running their own apps and services to branding and anything else.

That could give Firefox and Tizen a leg up on BlackBerry and Microsoft, Bernabè said. “In our opinion, who will prevail will be the open source platforms.”

There is still a huge challenge, though. Firefox OS actually has to run well. And that’s where the carrier’s dreams could end.

The list of companies that bet too early and too heavily on HTML is a long one that includes, most notably, Facebook, which has since reversed course and focused heavily on native work for iOS and Android.

Analysts say Firefox has lined up an impressive array of partners but still has a lot of work to do in order to deliver a product that will sell.

“The real acid test for Firefox OS and its long-term prospects is the quality of the software itself and the user and developer experiences that it fosters,” said Ovum analyst Tony Cripps. “What is clear from the Firefox OS demonstration handsets that we have seen was that they are still some way from being market ready, being both slow and buggy.”

Even low-cost smartphones have to work well, Cripps said, noting that there is increasing competition from Android as well as the latest generation of feature phones such as Nokia’s Asha touch line and Samsung’s Rex phones.

Meanwhile, the U.S. could prove an even tougher nut to crack. The home market is on Mozilla’s radar, but not the top priority, says CEO Gary Kovacs. The company announced Sprint as a partner, but didn’t give any details and Kovacs said the U.S. probably won’t see its first Firefox OS devices until 2014.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130224/why-carriers-just-love-firefox-os/feed/0Meet Mozilla's Host of New Mobile Partnershttp://allthingsd.com/20130224/live-mozilla-shows-off-its-firefox-os-work-in-barcelona/
http://allthingsd.com/20130224/live-mozilla-shows-off-its-firefox-os-work-in-barcelona/#commentsSun, 24 Feb 2013 16:08:04 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=297684Mozilla’s efforts to build a Web-based mobile operating system around its Firefox browser took a significant step forward on Sunday.

The company brought together several of its early partners in Barcelona to show the progress it has made in the months since it first unveiled the Firefox OS project.

Mozilla is among a number of companies seeking to provide an alternative to Android and iOS. It’s a crowded field, though, that includes BlackBerry, Microsoft and Canonical.

Among those slated to be on hand for the company’s press conference include the chiefs of carriers Deutsche Telekom, Telekom Italia, Telnor and Telefónica as well as Paul Jacobs, CEO of chipmaker Qualcomm.

We’ll have live coverage of the event when it kicks off around 9 am PT on Sunday. And Mozilla chief Gary Kovacs will have more to say about Firefox when he appears in April as part of our D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

5:36 pm Barcelona time: The event won’t begin for another 20 minutes or so, but the information is starting to trickle out. Among the additional partner names that have cropped up here at the event is Sprint.

5:47 pm: Telefonica R&D CEO Carlos Domingo is getting mobbed by reporters, most of whom want to get a photo of the Firefox OS phone he is holding.

5:49 pm: It looks like device makers LG, Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch are on board as well.

Alcatel, LG and ZTE will build the first devices, with Huawei’s first Firefox OS phones coming on later in the year.

Here’s ZTE’s phone:

Which looks to be headed to Telefonica’s movistar brand.

Telefonica plans a broad launch with devices headed to Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela around mid-year with more European and Latin American countries later in the year and into 2014. It will have models from Alcatel One Touch, LG and ZTE.

Here’s a look at an Alcatel model:

6:09 pm: Firefox CEO Gary Kovacs kicks off the company’s press conference with a shout out to the company’s co-founders Mitchell Baker and Brendan Eich, who are in the audience.

6:10 pm: Kovacs has some trouble advancing his slides, quips he is using an iPhone to control them.

Kovacs notes that when the company announced its phone OS plans last year it had only a couple early partners and it now has support from 17 carriers and several hardware makers.

6:12 pm: “We’re on the edge of unlocking mobile,” Kovacs says.

6:14 pm: Kovacs notes that his company isn’t profit-driven and won’t be with Firefox OS; the company’s goal is just to keep the Web at the center of things. That will keep power from being concentrated in one or two app stores, to allow lots of over-the-top services and support Web standards.

There shouldn’t be one or two companies that can approve the content seen by billions of people.

“That’s a broken model and it needs to change,” he said.

Kovacs asks all the partners at the event to stand, noting that it’s not easy to support version one of a product.

“I know you are not timid,” he said. “I’m on the phone with you.”

Initial handset makers, as we noted, are ZTE, Alcatel One Touch, LG and Huawei.

Things start out simple and easy, says Firefox’s Jay Sullivan. That’s because most Firefox OS customers will be coming from feature phones.

There will be a Firefox Marketplace to highlight Web apps, but the company isn’t asking developers to do anything different.

“We’re not looking to create a new ecosystem,” Sullivan said.

Among the early Web apps for the Firefox Marketplace are: AccuWeather, AirBnB, Box, Cut the Rope, Facebook, MTV Brasil, Pulse News, SoundCloud, SporTV, Terra, Time Out and Twitter.

And maps are kind of important, Sullivan notes, adding that Firefox has been working with Nokia to make sure its Here Maps work well under Firefox OS.

6:29 pm: Sullivan notes that even though Firefox OS is Web-based lots of things can be cached, even running in Airplane mode. He demos it with an issue of Time Out Barcelona stored for offline reading.

And while Mozilla will have a marketplace, they won’t be the only one, meaning there can be lots of vertical marketplaces as well as the option for device makers to distribute directly.

Mozilla also has an open model for payments, including a carrier billing option.

6:36 pm: Sullivan touting ability to dynamically configure phone for a point in time, like having a bunch of movie-related content for Oscar night without requiring a user to visit an app store.

6:39 pm: Now Mozilla is trotting out the carriers supporting Firefox OS, starting with Franco Bernabe, CEO of Telecom Italia, followed by Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta.

Telefonica plans to introduce Firefox OS devices in many markets this year and in all of its markets around the world by the end of next year.

“Duopolies are not beneficial for any industry” and Firefox OS should help, Alierta said.

6:53 pm: Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann said that his company will launch first in Poland this summer and then expand to other Eastern European markets, if all goes well there.

Latin American carrier America Movil said it plans to launch Firefox OS devices in all the countries where it operates.

6:55 pm: Q and A time.

Asked how Firefox OS will stand out from Android and iOS devices, Kovacs said that they can deliver mid- to high-end smartphone performance for the price of a high-end feature phone.

In terms of the United States, Kovacs said the company has plans for its home market. “We have partners lined up,” he said. “It’s not the first launch country,” he added, saying devices are likely in the U.S. next year.

Notably, Sprint — which is listed as a partner — didn’t speak at the event, which just wrapped up.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130224/live-mozilla-shows-off-its-firefox-os-work-in-barcelona/feed/0Mozilla Looks to Entice Developers With Firefox OS Phoneshttp://allthingsd.com/20130122/mozilla-looks-to-entice-developers-with-firefox-os-phones/
http://allthingsd.com/20130122/mozilla-looks-to-entice-developers-with-firefox-os-phones/#commentsTue, 22 Jan 2013 13:31:32 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=287293Aiming to build interest among mobile programmers, Mozilla announced Tuesday that it will make available preview hardware running its Firefox OS.

The two “developer preview” devices are being created in partnership with Geeksphone and Spanish carrier Telefonica. Telefonica has already said it will support the Web-based operating system on commercial devices expected later this year.

“Developer preview phones will help make the mobile web more accessible to more people,” Mozilla said in a blog posting on Tuesday. “Developers are critical to the web and to Mozilla’s mission to make the web accessible to everyone.”

The preview devices are unlocked. The low-end model, dubbed Keon, features a Qualcomm S1 processor and 3.5-inch touchscreen, among other features. A higher-end model, Peak, features a dual-core Qualcomm chip and a 4.3-inch screen.

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs will talk more about the Firefox OS project when he takes the stage at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in April.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130122/mozilla-looks-to-entice-developers-with-firefox-os-phones/feed/0Telefonica, Mozilla and VCs Still Betting Big on HTML5 as They Pour $25 Million Into Everything.Mehttp://allthingsd.com/20121128/telefonica-mozilla-and-vcs-still-betting-big-on-html-as-they-pour-25-million-into-everything-me/
http://allthingsd.com/20121128/telefonica-mozilla-and-vcs-still-betting-big-on-html-as-they-pour-25-million-into-everything-me/#commentsWed, 28 Nov 2012 12:00:15 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=273140For Mozilla to be successful with its Firefox OS, it needs a lot of good HTML5 apps and content.

Given that, it is not terribly surprising that Mozilla and carrier partner Telefonica are part of a $25 million investment round in Everything.Me, an Israeli start-up focused on helping create such programs. That said, it is the first time that Mozilla has taken part in the equity funding of a start-up.

The vision behind Everything.me, which started out more along the lines of mobile search, has evolved with its various rounds of funding.

These days, the company is positioning its service as a way to connect with the apps already on a user’s device, as well as other apps and services available from the cloud.

Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan says there is a very close alignment between what Everything.me is doing and Mozilla’s vision of a browser-based operating system.

“It’s a really good combination of what’s great about apps, and what’s great about the Web,” Sullivan said in a telephone interview.

The company isn’t sharing either its number of users or any details on how it plans to make money. It is currently available via HTML5 and as an iOS app, with plans for an Android version, as well.

Everything.me says it will continue to do native apps alongside its HTML5-only program, saying that it wants to reach as many people as possible.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121128/telefonica-mozilla-and-vcs-still-betting-big-on-html-as-they-pour-25-million-into-everything-me/feed/0Coalition of Tech Companies Aims to License LTE-Related Patentshttp://allthingsd.com/20121003/coalition-of-tech-companies-aims-to-license-lte-related-patents/
http://allthingsd.com/20121003/coalition-of-tech-companies-aims-to-license-lte-related-patents/#commentsWed, 03 Oct 2012 12:00:29 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=256457A group of large technology companies is banding together in an effort to license some of the underlying technology needed for products compatible with high-speed LTE wireless networks.

Ross

Among the companies banding together are AT&T, Clearwire, Hewlett-Packard, KDDI, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and ZTE. The effort is coordinated by Via Licensing, a spinoff of Dolby Laboratories that is in the business of managing patent pools.

Via Licensing isn’t disclosing the exact pricing for the LTE patents, which varies based on volume, but it is on the order of a few dollars per device.

One of the major challenges, though, is that the group only accounts for a small part of the patents essential to incorporating the LTE standard.

Via Licensing president Roger Ross said that it is difficult to put a precise estimate on how much of the intellectual property is behind the LTE standard, but estimates maybe 20 percent is represented by current partners. Via hopes eventually to have entities representing up to half of all the related intellectual property.

“We expect participation in this program to grow significantly once the patent pool is announced, even in the next few weeks,” said John Ehler, director of wireless programs for Via.

Some big names aren’t part of the group, though, including Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia. Nokia, for its part, says it has already licensed its LTE essential patents to more than 40 companies, noting that it has more than 400 families of patents related to the technology.

“This has been estimated by independent sources to represent around 50 percent of the total patents declared essential to LTE by all companies,” Nokia said. (Clearly, if you ask all the parties what percentage of LTE patents they hold, you will get an answer that adds up to more than 100 percent.)

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told AllThingsD on Tuesday that he sees intellectual property licensing as one of five key businesses for the company, alongside basic phones, Windows phones, location services and network infrastructure.

While Nokia is actively licensing its LTE patents, there is concern that other parties might use their LTE patents as bargaining power in an increasingly litigious wireless industry that has seen an array of lawsuits.

Ross said that it is frustrating to see so much litigation over standards-essential patents, especially when intellectual property holders are supposed to commit to reasonable licensing of their technology as part of the standards-setting processes.

Licensing efforts such as Via’s offer a way for the industry to save money while still allowing companies to get paid for their intellectual property.

“Every dollar companies don’t have to spend on litigation is a dollar they can spend on LTE innovation,” Ross said.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121003/coalition-of-tech-companies-aims-to-license-lte-related-patents/feed/0Mozilla Makes a Mobile Web Browser Feel Like a Smartphonehttp://allthingsd.com/20120906/mozilla-makes-a-mobile-web-browser-feel-like-a-smartphone/
http://allthingsd.com/20120906/mozilla-makes-a-mobile-web-browser-feel-like-a-smartphone/#commentsFri, 07 Sep 2012 00:14:02 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=248557A recent report by IHS predicted that half of all mobile phones will be smartphones by 2013. But existing smartphones are expensive. Mozilla and Telefónica want to change that.

Today at Mozilla’s San Francisco office, the partners previewed devices running Firefox OS, which they plan to sell in Brazil early next year. Firefox OS is a Web-based platform where all the features and apps are created using the HTML5 Web standard.

Firefox OS is basically a mobile browser, so apps that run within it are not tied to a particular operating system, like iOS, Android or Windows Phone. One advantage for buyers may be more flexibility about switching to a new phone because their apps and content won’t be locked onto a proprietary platform.

The goal of Firefox OS isn’t to compete with high-end devices, but to offer entry- to mid-level smartphones at feature phone prices. Mozilla demoed some of the OS features on a developer phone by ZTE, and it definitely shows promise.

The user interface is simple and reminiscent of Android in some places and acts very much like some of the entry-level smartphones available today. Mozilla said it’s working to make the performance as fast as possible, and we watched as applications, such as the phone dialer and camera, launched within seconds. We also downloaded a game from the Firefox OS Marketplace, and while it was a simple game, performance looked smooth.

Firefox OS will launch with about 15 core applications, including email, SMS, calendar, Firefox browser (yes, Firefox on Firefox) and camera. Like other smartphones, each app features an icon on the home screen for quick access. Functions such as pinch-to-zoom and photo editing options are also onboard.

Despite being a Web-based OS, you will still be able to access some apps even if you don’t have a network connection, as all the basic programs will be cached, according to Chris Lee, product manager of Firefox OS.

However, don’t expect to find many of the mobile-specific apps you might be familiar with from existing smartphones, until the developers who make them create Web versions.

The first Firefox OS smartphones are expected to hit the market in early 2013 through Telefónica, which offers service in 18 countries in Latin America and Europe. Other partners who have signed on include Sprint, Deutsche Telekom, Smart and Telecom Italia; hardware partners include TCL, ZTE and Qualcomm.

Mozilla’s broader goal is to make the Web a viable mobile platform. It is working to standardize some 40 APIs around various phone operations so that Web apps will work the same across different phones. Some simple ones, like battery levels and vibration, are already complete, but many more around functions like dialing and SMS are still being hashed out.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120906/mozilla-makes-a-mobile-web-browser-feel-like-a-smartphone/feed/3The Smartphone: Great Emancipator or a "Terrorist in Your Pocket"?http://allthingsd.com/20120711/the-smartphone-great-emancipator-or-a-terrorist-in-your-pocket/
http://allthingsd.com/20120711/the-smartphone-great-emancipator-or-a-terrorist-in-your-pocket/#commentsWed, 11 Jul 2012 17:36:23 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=229089For all the good that smartphones can do, they can also cause us to be disconnected workaholics incapable of living in the moment.

Photo: Michael Wagner / (c) FocusOnWagner.de

“Somebody called the smartphone in your pocket ‘the terrorist in your pocket,'” German Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen said during a speech in Munich on Wednesday.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120711/the-smartphone-great-emancipator-or-a-terrorist-in-your-pocket/feed/0Mozilla's HTML5 Phone Project, Now Christened Firefox OS, Signs Sprint and Other Carriershttp://allthingsd.com/20120702/mozillas-html5-phone-project-now-christened-firefox-os-signs-sprint-and-other-carriers/
http://allthingsd.com/20120702/mozillas-html5-phone-project-now-christened-firefox-os-signs-sprint-and-other-carriers/#commentsMon, 02 Jul 2012 13:01:46 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=226563The Mozilla open mobile project “Boot to Gecko” now has the official name Firefox OS.

It has won the support of a crew of global carriers, with the first Firefox OS phones set to launch early next year in Brazil, through Telefónica’s Vivo.

Firefox OS is to be an open mobile platform where every app and function is based on HTML5, with none of the so-called “native apps” specific to a particular operating system.

Want to make a call? HTML5. Want to send a message? HTML5. Want to play a game? HTML5.

The push toward HTML5 as a broader mobile platform comes at a time when some early advocates seem to be moving away from mobile Web applications out of frustration with their performance. For instance, the new version of the Facebook iPhone app has reportedly been rebuilt specifically for iOS to make it much faster. Previous versions had been built around HTML5 in the interest of compatibility across fragmented mobile platforms.

But Mozilla is doubling down on the Web. The named reference to Mozilla’s biggest brand is purposeful. Much as the Firefox browser targeted Internet Explorer, so Firefox OS is a major project meant to disrupt the existing smartphone leaders.

In this case, that’s iOS, Android and Windows Phone — where the operating systems and apps are not as open and compatible as Mozilla and its partners would like.

Firefox OS isn’t going to try to compete with the high end of the market, but rather with entry-level phones at relatively low prices, Mozilla has said. The thrust is to engage first-time smartphone users in emerging markets around the world.

The carrier partners on record supporting the project are now Deutsche Telekom, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor and Etisalat.

Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom’s Innovation Labs had previously gone public with support for the project in February at Mobile World Congress.

The first Firefox OS devices will be made by TCL Communication Technology/Alcatel One Touch and ZTE, with Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm.

(All this makes for interesting timing for Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs to speak at our Dive Into Mobile conference in October in New York City.)

First up, we have Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of engineering.

Facebook is unquestionably a mobile superpower — with more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 2012. But mobile products and monetization of them are the company’s biggest weakness and potential source of competition.

No surprise — Facebook is currently in the process of transforming itself from a Web-first to a mobile-first mentality.

Schrep, who joined Facebook in 2008 from Mozilla, is a key steward of that shift, as Facebook builds its infrastructure, systems and engineering to be mobile-first.

With a couple of computer science degrees from Stanford, Schroepfer is on the board of Ancestry.com and is also a trustee of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

As a free texting alternative, WhatsApp has insane global scale. It’s the No. 1 paid app in more than 50 countries on iOS. And it’s now one of the Top 10 apps of all time on Android, with more than 50 million installs.

As Ina Fried and I started planning Dive Into Mobile, we were cautious about committing to app makers early in the process, given that the market is so incredibly volatile. But it’s pretty clear that the story of WhatsApp will still be compelling in late October.

Just to give you a sense of the acceleration of this app: As of February 2012, WhatsApp said it was sending two billion messages per day — having doubled from one billion just three months before.

Koum, a Yahoo alum, has somehow managed to keep WhatsApp almost entirely off the press and speaker circuit radar — while fending off acquisition offers aplenty, from what we hear. He’s only ever spoken on stage about WhatsApp at Mobile World Congress, where WhatsApp took home the award for best overall app.

Schrep and Koum join an already strong lineup of timely speakers:

Android head Rubin returns to the D stage to talk about where things are headed. In addition to finding out what tasty dessert follows Jelly Bean, Rubin is likely to talk about the challenges of chasing Apple, bringing Android to ever-lower prices, and its latest efforts to crack the tablet market.

Nokia chief Elop is in the midst of a bold but difficult transition, as he aims to remake the Finnish phone maker. The company’s Windows Phone effort has taken off more slowly then hoped, while its existing Symbian phone business has tailed off faster than expected, adding financial pressure to the big strategic shift.

The result is that Nokia has had to cut jobs, close plants and make other moves designed to give the company the resources it needs. While some cutting was an inevitable part of the transition, the most recent efforts involved deeper moves, including the killing off of the company’s next-generation Meltemi operating system for low-end phones.

Mozilla leader Kovacs has grand ambitions of building a standalone operating system for the open Web. He’s working with Telefónica to release HTML5 devices, which should be a well-timed topic this fall when Dive Into Mobile kicks off.

There will be a lot more to come, of course, including some extraordinary demos, so we’ll update our speaker list as soon as we have more news.

Also to keep on your radar is our second annual D: Dive Into Media conference, next February in Laguna Niguel, which is being run by ATD media ninja Peter Kafka. The conference will delve into the extraordinary changes the media business is undergoing in every sector — from television and film to music and publishing.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120626/d-dive-into-mobile-speaker-bonanza-googles-rubin-nokias-elop-mozillas-kovacs-facebooks-schroepfer-and-whatsapps-koum/feed/0Boku Rings Up $35 Million in Funding From NEA, Telefonicahttp://allthingsd.com/20120315/boku-rings-up-35-million-in-funding-from-nea-telefonica/
http://allthingsd.com/20120315/boku-rings-up-35-million-in-funding-from-nea-telefonica/#commentsThu, 15 Mar 2012 11:48:06 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=186564Mobile payments start-up Boku has just secured $35 million to fund its expansion, after announcing a new white-label mobile payments service.

The capital comes from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Telefonica, one of the world’s largest mobile operators, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures and others. So far, Boku, which works with wireless carriers for online buying and direct billing through wireless accounts, has raised a total of $75 million since its launch in 2009.

Boku will use the funding to expand the recently announced Boku Accounts service, the company said in a statement. The funds will also help with the continued expansion of the company’s global infrastructure. The San Francisco-based start-up currently operates in 67 countries around the globe, and works with 260 mobile-network operators.

As my AllThingsD colleague Tricia Duryee puts it, a lot of companies believe that the mobile payments industry is set to take off over the next few years, with Boku being just one of them. But with so many approaches being explored, it’s not clear which solutions consumers will end up adopting.

Some — like Google, which has introduced Google Wallet, or Isis, a joint venture between wireless companies — believe near field communication technology is the future of people paying with their mobile phones. This is unlike what start-up Square is doing — allowing contractors and small businesses to take payments via their iPhones or iPads using a small, square dongle.

Some credit card companies, including Visa, are developing their own form of the digital wallet; while online payments giant PayPal has recently said that the digital wallet for consumers is something that lives in the cloud and should be device-agnostic, not tied to any one type of smartphone.

PayPal is also getting into direct payments at point-of-sale systems in stores. So far, it’s offering customers the ability to pay by punching in a PayPal account number or by swiping a PayPal card at 2,000 Home Depot stores across the U.S. This is a potential threat to traditional credit card companies, such as Visa and MasterCard, as PayPal has the ability to undercut the fees that merchants pay to accept the traditional networks’ cards.

With Boku Accounts, Boku is actually working with a credit card company — MasterCard — by giving clients the ability to use a MasterCard magstripe to pay. Customers can also pay at NFC-enabled terminals with an NFC sticker on their phones, or they can pay with their wireless phone number at participating merchants.

Boku has said the advantage of this system is that merchants don’t have to “re-terminalize” — install an entirely new payment terminal — in order to accept Boku payments.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120315/boku-rings-up-35-million-in-funding-from-nea-telefonica/feed/0EC Confirms Inquiry Into Possible Telecom Collusionhttp://allthingsd.com/20120314/ec-confirms-inquiry-into-possible-telecom-collusion/
http://allthingsd.com/20120314/ec-confirms-inquiry-into-possible-telecom-collusion/#commentsWed, 14 Mar 2012 16:57:09 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=186260The European Commission is questioning five of Europe’s largest telecommunications companies over concerns that a series of meetings held among them may have constituted collusion.

Topics of discussion reportedly ran the gamut of innocent topics — from mobile payment platforms to the creation of a common app platform. But evidently the EC is concerned that more nefarious things may have been discussed, and if that was the case, whether the meetings constituted collusion.

The European Commission confirmed the inquiry, but stressed that at this stage no formal investigation has been launched.

“The requests for information relate to the manner in which standardization for future services in the mobile-communications area is taking place,” a spokesman for EC Competition Chief Joaquin Almunia explained. “These fact-finding steps do not mean that we have competition concerns at this stage, nor do they prejudge the follow-up.”

So this may not necessarily lead to an official investigation. That said, such requests do often signal that a more detailed probe is in the offing.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120314/ec-confirms-inquiry-into-possible-telecom-collusion/feed/0Cisco Lays Out Aggressive Strategy to Capture More Cloud Businesshttp://allthingsd.com/20111206/cisco-lays-out-agressive-strategy-to-capture-more-cloud-business/
http://allthingsd.com/20111206/cisco-lays-out-agressive-strategy-to-capture-more-cloud-business/#commentsTue, 06 Dec 2011 17:37:12 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=150794Networking giant Cisco Systems has been angling to be a serious provider of cloud technology for a few years now, but hasn’t really laid out a strategy for how it intends to get there. Now that I think about it, it will be exactly a year ago tomorrow that I did my very first AllThingsD interview with Lew Tucker, Cisco’s CTO for cloud computing.

Today, Cisco finally laid out a cohesive strategy to become a significant player in the cloud business. It announced an offering called CloudVerse that combines three big elements — its Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network and Cloud Applications — into a big portfolio aimed at companies building out their data centers.

The idea is basically this: If you want to build a cloud, either to resell cloud services of some kind or for your company’s own internal operations, Cisco wants to talk to you. Under the CloudVerse tent are a bunch of offerings including computing, networking, collaboration and software for automating and managing it all.

Cisco named a handful of companies who are already CloudVerse customers, and a few will catch your eye, because they’re big. One is Terremark, the Web-hosting and cloud-services outfit that telecom giant Verizon acquired earlier this year. Others include Telecom Italia, Telefonica Spain and Fujitsu.

Naturally, Cisco is hoping to use its position as the supplier of choice for networking gear as a springboard into selling more stuff inside the data center, and it already has key relationships with many a corporate CIO. A key part of its go-to-market strategy will be convincing those CIOs that it has something unique to offer.

Here’s one such thing: The Network Positioning System and Cloud-to-Cloud connected. Imagine you have a sprawling set of far-flung data centers around the globe. When one center gets starts to get close to reaching its capacity load — maybe it’s Cyber Monday or something — Cisco’s NPS technology allows the routers in one data center to start automatically looking around for capacity elsewhere, to keep things humming along.

There’s a lot more detail to it, but it’s worth pointing out that, as a percentage of Cisco’s business, the cloud business isn’t huge. On an earnings conference call with analysts last month, CEO John Chambers said that the Unified Computing System that forms the backbone of its server business had recorded 116 percent revenue growth year over year; even with that, it’s on run-rate to being a $1 billion annualized business. If it hits that mark in Cisco’s fiscal year 2012, which ends in July, it will amount to about 2 percent of estimated annual sales.

But Cisco expects the cloud business opportunity to grow like crazy. Last week, it issued something called the Cisco Cloud Index, which estimates that more than half of all computing workloads will be running in data centers by 2014, and that the daily traffic conducted on cloud services of various types will amount to 1.6 zettabytes per year. My math may be off a bit, but compare it to the scale of your average hard drive — a zettabyte amounts to a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. Cisco describes it as enough data to amount to four days of high-quality video streaming for every person on Earth.

It’s a serious opportunity, no doubt. The question is whether or not Cisco can exploit it in a manner that moves the needle. Doing so is an important part of the strategy that Chambers set forth as part of the epic restructuring that has been going on at Cisco since last year. Investors seem to like what they see, as Cisco shares are trading at $18.80 today, which is up 41 percent from a recent 52-week low. As turnarounds go, it does look like progress.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111206/cisco-lays-out-agressive-strategy-to-capture-more-cloud-business/feed/0Nokia's Lumia 800 Is Pretty, All Right -- Pretty Expensivehttp://allthingsd.com/20111107/nokias-lumia-800-is-pretty-alright-pretty-expensive/
http://allthingsd.com/20111107/nokias-lumia-800-is-pretty-alright-pretty-expensive/#commentsMon, 07 Nov 2011 22:10:48 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=141412As handsome as it might be, the Lumia 800 — Nokia’s new marquee WP7-based smartphone — may have a tough time at market, and for a very simple reason. It’s viewed as overpriced, and not just by analysts who voiced that concern within days of the device’s debut.

Nokia’s carrier partners are now complaining as well. Speaking to Telecoms.com, Simon Lee-Smith, GM of Devices at Telefónica, said that the Lumia 800 is just too damn pricey to succeed.

“If Nokia wants to sell in volume, they need to bring out devices which are cost-competitive,” Lee-Smith said. “[Their high-end devices] are not yet at the right price point.”

And with the Lumia 800 priced at €420 / $577 US (pre-tax and pre-subsidy), he does have a point. Though the hardware is slick — very slick, actually — the Lumia is really just an “as good as” device with nothing to differentiate it from the competition. It’s table stakes, and costly ones at that. And that may make it a tough sell — unless Nokia heeds the advice of Lee-Smith and others and drops its price.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111107/nokias-lumia-800-is-pretty-alright-pretty-expensive/feed/0Telefonica Signs BOKU to Aid With In-App Paymentshttp://allthingsd.com/20110829/telefonica-signs-boku-to-help-build-own-app-store/
http://allthingsd.com/20110829/telefonica-signs-boku-to-help-build-own-app-store/#commentsMon, 29 Aug 2011 13:16:39 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=114717Global wireless carrier Telefonica is aiming to make it easier for developers that want to enable in-app payments on their network, tapping BOKU to aid in the effort.

The move is the carrier’s latest effort to enable network-specific features such as Internet telephony, text messaging and carrier billing, all tapping directly into Telefonica’s network. (This NewsByte has been updated, correcting an earlier mischaracterization of the service.)

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20110829/telefonica-signs-boku-to-help-build-own-app-store/feed/0Boku Signs Direct Billing Relationship for Physical Goods with Telefonicahttp://allthingsd.com/20110323/boku-signs-direct-billing-relationship-for-physical-goods-with-telefonica/
http://allthingsd.com/20110323/boku-signs-direct-billing-relationship-for-physical-goods-with-telefonica/#commentsWed, 23 Mar 2011 17:21:47 +0000http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3816Boku, a mobile payments provider, said it has signed a direct carrier billing relationship with Telefónica’s O2 in Germany. That means that O2 customers can charge virtual, digital and physical goods ranging from .09 Euros to 30 Euros to their carrier bill by entering their phone number into an app or other form. In general, the trend has been for carriers to increasingly lower the fees they charge for physical goods to make charging lower margin goods to the carrier bill more feasible. Boku says it’s connected to 230 operators in 65 countries, although not all carriers support physical payments.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20110323/boku-signs-direct-billing-relationship-for-physical-goods-with-telefonica/feed/0